Friday, June 5, 2015

Hate mongers often need
concocted stories to buttress their political message. In India, these are most
common in that peculiar Indian form of hatred: anti-Brahminism. As the local
counterpart to what anti-Semitism has been in the West, it fantasizes about how
Brahmins have only domination over us lesser mortals as their uppermost
concern. Everything a Brahmin does, just has to be a wily stratagem to
manipulate others. With their greater book-orientedness and heavy
overrepresentation in the writing professions, they control public discourse
and make others look at the world through Brahminical glasses. No matter how
you try to gain autonomy, they manage to outwit you, even to the point of
taking control over progressive movements, even over anti-Brahminism itself.

Against such a formidable
enemy, any means are justified. That may well be the reason why Abheek Barman chose
to write the misleading opinion piece: “Why did PM Modi skip mentioning
Savarkar at the Mathura rally?” (Economic
Times, 27 May 2015). Alternatively, given the preponderance of borrowed,
deformed and simply mistaken historical ideas in the anti-Brahmin movement, he
may only have been misinformed.

For starters, Vinayak
Damodar Savarkar did not found “the ‘parivar’, that he started and which now
holds the reins of power in New Delhi”. He was president of the rivalling Hindu
Mahasabha in 1937-43, though not its founder: when it was created (1915 or
1922, depending on the definition), as also in 1925 when the RSS as backbone of
the Parivar (family) was founded, he was in jail and barred from participating
in politics. He did, however, launch the concept Hindutva as a political
category common to several Hindu Nationalist organizations, and indeed adopted
as central to the RSS worldview.

Much is made also of Savarkar’s
plea to the British for a lenient treatment, and his pledge of loyalty, after
he had been confined to the Andaman Penal Colony. Anti-Hindus let on their
secret fear of Savarkar as a Hindu leader when they assert that he should have
locked himself up in stern but sterile opposition, merely being heroic and
dying – the very policy that the Rajputs pursued, ultimately to the detriment
of the Hindu cause. The truth is that Savarkar was too intelligent for that. He
played his cards well and managed to actively serve the Hindu cause once again
after his early release. It is this strategic acumen that Nehruvians like Barman
cannot forgive him for.

It must be admitted,
though, that the anti-Hindu camp is very savvy in its use of arguments
developed by anyone, as long as they are useful for the anti-Hindu cause.
Seeing that Savarkar was being lionized by the Hindus, someone at the Communist
fortnightly Frontline decided to belittle Savarkar as essentially a coward who
had others do the killing that he planned, moreover a toady of the British. In
reality, the British gave Savarkar two life sentences and many years of actual
imprisonment for his proven anti-British opposition, much harsher than anything
that the luxury inmates Gandhi and Nehru have had to endure, let alone the
caviar Communists at Frontline. Their attempts to cut him to size only draw
attention to the fact that they aren’t qualified to touch his feet.Yet, ill-conceived as this anti-Savarkar mudslinging
was, it has been taken over by all anti-Hindu spokesmen and is now being used
to maximum effect. This contrasts with Hindutva behavior: when any new
pro-Hindu argument is launched, the Hindu Nationalist movement will ignore it
and fall back on the same worn-out outpourings of long-dead stalwarts like Guru
Golwalkar, blind to the proven impotence of this outdated rhetoric.

Gandhi

indu
cause once again after his release

Then, we see Mahatma Gandhi
for the umpteenth time called the “Father of the Nation”. Though quite vain (as
when he condoned the crowd demanding that MA Jinnah address him as “Mahatma”
rather than “Mister”), Gandhi himself would have rejected this epithet. It stems
from the new-fangled Nehruvian notion that India is a “nation in the
making”conceived by the political
unification under Queen Victoria, whereas Gandhi saw himself as a son of an
age-old nation. This falsehood is a cornerstone of the Nehruvian rhetoric, but
then nobody in his right mind had considered falsity and Nehruism incompatible.

Gandhi is also termed an
“implacable opponent of the British, who won independence for India”. Though
admittedly very common worldwide, this myth crumbles when you investigate it
properly. His love of the British came out several times in successive wars
when he organized military or humanitarian support for the British camp, or
when he forced the apparent Congress candidate for the first Prime
Ministership, Sardar Patel, to step down in favour of the anglicizer Jawaharlal
Nehru. The confused and contradictory course he charted, actually caused
serious setbacks to the freedom movement. Ultimately it was Britain’s weakening
in World War 2 and India’s heightened self-confidence through its wartime
record that convinced the British to withdraw. As the decolonizing British PM
Clement Attlee later confided, Gandhi’s role had been “minimal”.

Trinity

That Narendra Modi singled
out Deendayal Upadhyaya, co-founder of the Jan Sangh, predecessor of the BJP, as
“one of the three pillars of Indian politics”, together with Mahatma Gandhi and
Ram Manohar Lohia, would be a fit topic for criticism, for it is indeed an
ill-conceived choice. Lohia launched casteism in politics, a tendency here
flatteringly referred to as opposition to “upper-caste domination over
subalterns”. Gandhi’s policies of strict non-violence and economic primitivism,
if followed, would have finished India long ago.

Upadhyaya had the merit of
coining the phrase “Integral Humanism”, which in a nutshell says everything
Dharmic politics should be. It would still be a good thing if the BJP today
would highlight “Integral Humanism” as its real ideological commitment, instead
of weasel terms like “Nationalism”. Call it “Dharma” for Indians and people
with a vivid Indian connection, “Integral Humanism” for foreign consumption or
in English-language media.

Unfortunately, in his
elaboration of this bright idea, Upadhyaya proved too attached to the RSS
fixation on a “national soul” (ultimately stemming from European Romantic
thinker Johann Herder), which took up all the space in his booklet with the
promising title. People who knew him confided to me that he was an all too
ordinary man, which corresponds to the verifiable mediocrity of his ideas. But
for Barman, these are trifles pertaining to the contents of his ideological
work, unimportant next to the damning indictment that he was “a Brahmin” and
“an early member of the RSS”. What much of ideology he does consider, is
sweeping and inaccurate (“hostile to the all ideas of individualism,
capitalism, democracy and communism”), but we can put that down to the space
constraints of a mere column.

Why not Savarkar?

Anyway, the crucial
question for him is also crucial for us: “But why did Modi skip Savarkar, whose
image in Parliament he paid homage to, soon after becoming PM? The RSS
celebrates him as ‘Veer’ or ‘valiant’. From the 1920s, he was the main
ideologue of the RSS that came into being on Vijaya Dashami, 1925. Savarkar
wrote its basic text, ‘Hindutva’ in 1923.”

Indeed, though Savarkar was
formally not one of them, his Hindutva ideology was all-important to the RSS
and its daughter organizations, including the present ruling party. Why did
Modi not even mention him? Has he been superseded by more recent Hindu
ideologues, such as that other Jan Sangh president, Balraj Madhok, or by
historian Sita Ram Goel, or by later converts to Hindu politics like Arun
Shourie and Subramanian Swamy?

And it is not that Modi was
shy about naming names. Mentioning Gandhi may have been in deference to the
actual moral aura that the Mahatma still enjoys worldwide, and Upadhyaya may
have been unavoidable for an RSS loyalist. But he lionized Lohia of all people,
the stalwart of the divisive casteist poison that has so long paralyzed Indian
politics. He actually preferred the socialist caste-monger Lohia to Savarkar,
as well as to all other unnamed Hindu leaders and thinkers.

Could the reason be that
Modi partakes of the intellectual culture of the RSS: borrowing from Nehruvian
sources, playing by the rules laid down by the enemy? But such considerations
are outside the Nehruvian worldview, which catalogues anything done by any
Hindutva hate figure as wily, fanatic, part of a tough secret plan motivated by
Hindu interests. It just doesn’t occur to Barman that nominal Hindu
Nationalists are really obedient playthings in his own side’s own hands. Not
that they themselves fail to treat Hindus as enemies, but Hindus refuse to see
this and treat them as their own standard, as their Guru. Even when securely in
power, Hindu Nationalists still crawl before the secularist standard.

Savarkar’s sins

Anyway, Barman puts it down
to a belated recognition of Savarkar’s own sins. The worst is of course that he
was “a Chitpavan Brahmin”. At age 12 already, young Savarkar took a leadership
role in a communal riot. That he was an accomplice in the assassination of a
British official should count as relatively good (if not the means, at least
the purpose) for an avowed admirer of “implacable” opposition to the British.
Ah, but that admiration was only meant for Gandhi, the man responsible for many
thousands of deaths during the Partition massacres, the man who let others do
the killing (described as an act of cowardice in Savarkar’s case) all while
keeping his own hands clean even to the point of becoming a by-word for
non-violence.

Barman also claims that
Savarkar “wrote of the ‘unity’ of all Hindus, but his writing had no place for
Muslims, Sikhs or other communities”. It is only a dogma of the Nehruvians,
including the separatist section among the Sikhs, that Sikhi is a separate
religion. From a scholarly viewpoint, of course Sikhs are Hindus: all Indian “unbelievers”
were called just that by the Muslim invaders who introduced the very term
“Hindu”. And at least Barman should know that from a Hindutva viewpoint, Sikhs
are Hindus just as Buddhists, Tribals and other Indian religionists are. That
precisely is what “the unity of all Hindus” means. Barman is a frog in the well
who projects his own limited and ignorant Nehruvian worldview onto more mature
views.

Then, Barman accuses
Savarkar (and another Chitpavan Brahmin, prominent freedom fighter BG Tilak) of
having espoused the Aryan Invasion Theory. This is the cornerstone of British
rule in India, of missionary propaganda and of the anti-Brahmin agitation among
Tribals, Dalits, Dravidians; indeed, of Barman’s own anti-Brahminism. And it is
true that Savarkar was wrong in this regard, having been mesmerized by the then
all-powerful belief that linguistics had somehow proven he Aryan invasion and
thus overruled Hindu tradition, which knows of no Aryan invasion but only of
several “Aryan” emigrations. (But while Savarkar was wrong 90 years ago, under
several constraints, the anti-Brahmin movement entertains the same mistake even
today.) Contrary to Barman’s claims, it was not exported from India to Europe
but had been invented in Europe ca. 1820, after several decades of assuming
that the newly-discovered Indo-European language family had originated in
India.

Let us face the fact here
that Savarkar’s worldview was influenced by the then Zeitgeist (spirit of the times), which no longer obtains. Likewise,
Mahatma Gandhi is badly outdated, as are Ram Manohar Lohia (though sinister
disintegrationists including Barman try to keep his legacy alive) and Deendayal
Upadhyaya. It is one of the worst traits of Hindu Nationalism that it refuses
to grow and just keeps on hero-worshipping long-dead leaders without making
their inspiration evolve with the times.

Savitri Devi

And then Barman gets really
off track: “Savarkar’s story has a sinister follow up. By the late 1920s, a
European woman called Miximiani Portas travelled to India, where faced with
deportation, she married Asit Krishna Mukherji, then the only Indian supporter
of Nazism and Japanese expansionism across Asia. (...) Inherently racist, but
with a mystical awe of ancient Hindu and Egyptian civilisations, Savitri
gobbled up Savarkar’s bizarre Aryan theories. (…) ideas of Aryan racial
supremacy, and the inherent ‘sub-humanity’ of other people, travelled via
Savitri Devi to Adolf Hitler. She believed that Hitler was the divine power
that would deliver this world from the Kali Yuga. Savitri Devi – and Savarkar –
helped Hitler form his bizarre racial theories.”

Having devoted a
few hundred pages to the sad case of Savitri Devi (chapters in The Saffron Swastika, 2001, and in Return
of the Swastika, 2007), I will not fill up this limited space with the many
reasons why Barman’s version is worse than imaginary. The reader merely has to
consider the chronology to see that this is impossible. Adolf Hitler wrote his Mein Kampf, full of “Aryan racial
supremacy and the inherent ‘sub-humanity’ of other people” in 1923, when
Maximiani Portas was a young student and Savarkar a prisoner. Until then,
Savarkar had only written a few books about Indian history, which didn’t
interest Hitler, and about the anti-colonial struggle, which Hitler strongly
opposed. So no, Savarkar did not influence Hitler and did not give him the very
European idea of the Aryan race. (But at least, Mein Kampf and Savarkar’s Hindutva
were written at the same time and both in captivity, a likeness about which
astrologers and fantasy writers like Barman could certainly think up a good
story.)

Maximiani Portas
brought her Aryan theory with her into India, as she had learned it in Europe.
She only took Indian ideas with her back to Europe when she could leave India at
long last in 1945, too late for Hitler to learn anything from her.
Incidentally, she had taken the name Savitri
Devi shortly after settling in India, years before she married Mukherji. It
is but one of the many mistakes of detail accumulated in Barman’s brief column.
She did have a peculiar veneration for Hitler as well as for Genghis Khan and
for Pharaoh Akhenaten, the founder of monotheism and iconoclasm (a tradition
that has particularly victimized Hinduism through Islam). She prefigured the
many Westerners who have travelled to India to brew their own combination of
Hindu and Western ideas, and who often ended up getting sun-struck.

What Barman
strategically omits, is that after the outbreak of World War 2, Savarkar
immediately offered help in the anti-Nazi war effort and started recruiting for
the British-Indian Army. Indeed, Gandhi would deride him as a “recruiting
officer”, forgetting how he himself as a British loyalist had recruited Indian
volunteers for the British war effort in the Boer War, the Zulu War and World
War 1. Of course, in Barman’s game, it is “heads Hindus lose, tails anti-Hindus
win”: if Savarkar had sided with the Axis against the British (as the secular
Leftist Subhas Bose did), he would have been denounced as a proven Nazi, and
now that he worked for the opposing camp, he is denounced as a British toady.
In reality, he had only India’s best interests at heart, which he thought were
best served by enlisting in the British-Indian Army, just as Bose thought that
enlisting in the Axis Armies was the best course to India’s independence.
Barman with his puny divisive ideas would not understand, but Savarkar and
Bose, for all their differences, were first of all patriots.

Conclusion

Why did Narendra
Modi not enumerate Savarkar, as the coiner of the political category Hindutva, among his political role
models, when he did include the whimsical Mahatma, the divisive Lohia, and the
mere follower Upadhyaya? For a reason that doesn’t figure in Barman’s
worldview: BJP secularism. Whereas Nehruvians like to portray the RSS-BJP as a
formidable enemy mercilessly pursuing the Hindu agenda, the fact is that most
BJP stalwarts prefer to keep the Hindu agenda as far removed from their
policies as possible. They serve their time in government and enjoy the perks
of office, meanwhile hopefully cleaning up the economic mess that Congress has
left behind, but never touching a serious Hindu concern with a barge-pole.

This even counts
for the Prime Minister, whom Barman and his ilk have spent a dozen years demonizing
as a Hindu fanatic. The Hindutva once espoused by the Jan Sangh (1952-77) should
be updated, the old formulas should be allowed to evolve, of course. But most
BJP stalwarts are not interested in any evolution of their ideology, the only
evolution they can conceive of is betrayal. They have never developed an
ideological backbone; instead, they have continuously borrowed conclusions from
the Nehruvians and others who did their own thinking for non-Hindu purposes.
They had the pick-pocket mentality of getting things on the cheap, of being
mentally lazy and borrowing their ideas from elsewhere.

That is why both
BJP Prime Ministers thus far, Atal Behari Vajpayee and now Modi, have professed
their secularism. No, not age-old Hindu “secularism” (in the sense of religious
pluralism) but the anti-Hindu ideology that is falsely called “secularism”.
They essentially live up to the standards set by their enemies because their
movement has never seriously developed a perspective of its own.

About Me

Koenraad Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a few hippie years he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998.
As an independent researcher he earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. He also published on the interface of religion and politics, correlative cosmologies, the dark side of Buddhism, the reinvention of Hinduism, technical points of Indian and Chinese philosophies, various language policy issues, Maoism, the renewed relevance of Confucius in conservatism, the increasing Asian stamp on integrating world civilization, direct democracy, the defence of threatened freedoms, and the Belgian question. Regarding religion, he combines human sympathy with substantive skepticism.